Chapter 2: Pour Some Sugar on Me

Medway High School, Arva, Ontario

8:35am, Wednesday, February 14, 1979

(Note: This school had 9 – 35 minute class periods/day with either 5 or 10 minute breaks between periods. The first period started at 8:40am and school ended at 2:45pm with the buses leaving at 2:55pm)

“Hey Mike,” Lynette softly said as I walked over to her in the hallway. “Are you sure you’re OK? That was a nasty looking fall.”

“Oh yeah,” I replied, knowing that this was just her way to get to or ask what really was on her mind. “When I got out of control there at the end, it was kinda scary but when I saw how I was landing, I figured I could somehow make a semi-controlled crash landing.”

“That you did,” she said with a bit of laughter in her words. After we starting walking to our first period math class and a semi-awkward pregnant pause, she stumbled out, “Uh, you uh, played a pretty good game last night against those Beavers. You scored what, 5 points?”

“Thanks. Yeah, I made one nice jump-shot and went 3 for 4 from the charity stripe. I was more pleased with how I pressured their yappy point guard and created 4 turnovers by him.” Because Lynette was a good basketball player and an incredible athlete herself, I knew she would understand the importance of playing good defense along with a player’s scoring totals.

“He was a little punk, wasn’t he?” she replied, without waiting for me to address her question. As we went down the stairs to the 1^st floor, she stopped on the halfway landing area and stared at me for a couple of seconds. “Something about you is different today, and I just can’t put my finger on it. Are you going to tell me what it is or are you going to leave me hanging here over it?”

I lightly laughed at her and her question, not because it was funny but because of the intrigued expression on her face and how she grabbed my arm to make me wait beside her. With her staring up at me from her 5 foot, 7 inch vantage point, I smiled at her and asked, “What are you doing right now, with me, that you probably didn’t do as much of with me, yesterday or even since last fall when we talked or walked together?”

“Mike,” she said drawing out my name as if begging me to tell her. “I don’t know what I’m doing differently now with you, other than wanting to smack you upside your head.”

My smile got bigger as she pleaded to me with her brown eyes and her non-serious physical threat. “How are you looking at me Lynette? How are you using your eyes to do it?” I said to prompt her thought processes. I tilted my head upward when she didn’t seem to get my drift.

“I don’t know, I’m uh, looking up at you I guess,” she said with her ‘I’m drawing straws here‘ look on her face.

“Ding, ding. We have a winner now. You’re looking up at me because I think I grew an inch or two in the past day or so. I don’t know how but I’m just taller.” The last part was an obvious little white lie but since it was my first day back in time, I figured it best to keep everything about my new adventure under wraps for the time being.

“You are taller! I thought you might have worn some type of dress shoe but you’re wearing your Chucks right now. God Mike, that is so cool.” Lynette’s facial expression suddenly changed from bewilderment to amazement then to a deep concentrated look in a few seconds. “How tall do you think you are?”

“A little more than 5-10. Kane told me he was almost 5-10 and I was just a tad taller than him this morning. I uh, had to change into sweats for school this morning as the jeans I wore yesterday were above my Chucks when I put them on.” We started to head on down the stairs again after I commented about my height. Looking at Lynette, I still thought she hadn’t really said what she intended to say to me. So I decided to speed up the process a little by asking, “Something else is running through your pretty little head right now besides my physical appearance. Come on, beautiful, spill it.”

Lynette both blushed some and turned slightly away from me as she realized I knew something was up. With her turned slightly from me, she reached into her book bag and pulled out a red envelope with my name neatly written on the outside, and a small heart as the dot over the ‘i’ in my name. “Happy Valentine’s Day Mike,” she said as she gave me the card.

Now it was my turn to blush as I looked at the envelope and writing on it. As I opened it I said, “Thanks Lynette. I’m really feeling like a heel right now because I didn’t get you a Valentine’s card.”

She smiled and chuckled as we approached the door to our math class. “Did you get anyone a Valentine’s Day card?”

“No,” I said sheepishly. “I didn’t really think about it in all honesty.”

“I figured as much and I’m not upset with you for not getting me a card. Most high school guys won’t get a bunch of Valentine cards to pass out like us girls are prone to do.” Lynette took my right hand softly in her hands and smiled up at me. “Now, if you didn’t get Kathy a card and something nice though, that wouldn’t be cool at all and I may have to hurt you because of it.”

“Uh, there’s no Kathy at the moment,” I said. Lynette pulled back from me a step or two because she knew I was dating a girl from Catholic Central in the fall. I guess I never told her or the others that she ditched me a few days before Christmas. “I’ve been bachin’ it since right before Christmas time, I’m afraid.”

She scrunched up her eyes for a moment and said, “I’m sorry to hear that. Why didn’t you tell me, us?”

“You know I wasn’t much for sharing details of what Kathy and I did. When uh, she called me before Christmas to say it was finished, I had those two weeks of holiday time to get over it and move on. It’s been kinda nice not worrying about asking either my mom or my brother to drive me to her place or to a movie or whatever. I guess I should have told y’all about it.”

“Y’all?” she said looking at me after I let that southern term slip out. I didn’t pay any attention to her bemusement, so she continued, “Still, I’m sorry to hear that.”

We walked down the rows of desks and sat down beside each other in Mrs. Bumstead’s math room (Honest – we had a math/PE teacher by that name!). Mrs. B was the hot, new teacher at our school. She was definitely well put together with long soft dirty blonde curls. Because she also taught some of the girls’ physical education classes, she often wore tight coaching shorts and coaching shirts, which plainly showed off her tight butt and her full, ‘D-sized’ breasts.

“Thanks and thanks for this card,” I replied to her. I pulled out the card and laughed a little too loudly at the poem written inside it, which drew Mrs. B’s attention.

“And what is so funny this morning, my good man?” she asked me from the front of the room. I knew from the smile on her grinning face that she saw me reading a Valentine’s card.

I tried to act cool in response to her light grilling but couldn’t keep the smile from my face. “Just the little poem in this card,” I said hoping Mrs. B would let it drop. When I saw her nod and smile even more, I knew that wasn’t going to be the case though.

“Can you share it with us or is it a little too R-rated for public consumption?”

“Ha, I wish,” I replied back and realized that probably wasn’t a good thing to say with Lynette sitting right beside. When I turned to look at her, her eyes were as big as saucers but then she burst out laughing with the rest of the class at my comment. “Uh, no it’s not R-rated. If you really want to me to read it, I will.”

“I probably wasn’t going to have you to read it but I think you need to now as penance for your smart little comment there.” She then gestured with a wave of her arm to inform me that I was to come up to the front to read the card.

I stood up beside my desk and asked, “I can’t read it from here?” which was about ¾ of the way back in the room. With a quick little negative head shake, Mrs. Bumstead moved off over to the windows to await my Valentine’s card recital.

With my head lowered, I trudged up to the front of the class and heard a few whoops as I passed my classmates. When I turned around to face them, I’m sure I was nearly beet red. I held up the 5x8 inch card to show everyone the picture on the front. It showed a couple of basketball players in action. The defensive guy was wearing a red uniform with white hearts and Cupid’s arrows on his shorts and jersey, and the offensive player had on a black uniform with gold pitch-folks and little red devil images on it.

I figured I might as well make a production out of this experience, so I quickly focused on my prior public speaking and teaching experiences to calm my youthful nerves down some and said in a soft voice, “This is obviously an attempt to use the rough and tumble sports world to explain the constant battle that goes on between the romantic, flirtatious ‘Cupid’...” Then I switched my tone to a deeper sinister sound and opined, “With the more daring, bad-boy or ‘Devilish’ aspects of a relationship.” When I looked at Lynette, she smiled and winked at me which I took as confirmation of my explanation.

Most of the other hormonally charged girls in the class appeared to flip on their feminine, romance switch as I attempted to Pour Some Sugar on this little Valentine production. A good number of their faces glowed as I began with the cupid production. When I glanced over to Mrs. B, I saw that even she was smiling big time at my syrupy introduction to this ‘show and tell’ situation. Most of the guys in the class were simply smiling and nodding their heads as I contrasted the sweetness with the bad-boy aspects.

“In this picture, you can easily imagine some action and a counter action from the players, just like when we’re playing. One guy attacks and the defender adjusts to what his opponent is doing on the court. When the game is played well, there is always some interesting interplay or gamesmanship going on.” I paused for a second to give the non-sports folks a chance to develop some type of image in their minds.

“Now,” I started back up again. “When we juxtapose this interplay into the ‘Valentine-ish’ realm for today, we often have a little ‘Cupidity’ angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other with both relational creatures attempting to sway us down their distinct path of love, romance or pure lust.” When I looked around the class after that line, I saw that Lynette’s expression changed slightly from her earlier amused state to one that sure looked like desire, based on my 24 extra years of relational experiences.

‘What was going now with her?‘ On my first time through high school, Lynette and I were simply good athletic buddies or had the dreaded ‘just friends’ type relationship. I did a quick but thorough check of my memories and I didn’t recall ever seeing her act all-dreamy eyed like she currently appeared to be as I put on this little show.

Before I opened the card to the cute Valentine’s picture and poem, I quickly made eye contact with her again for a couple of seconds, and then subtly winked back at her. As I studied her, Lynette’s face became more relaxed and starry eyed, and she let out a small, barely perceptible sigh. Right then, my confusion increased and I began to run through a few crazy scenarios in my head involving my previous and current favorite ‘buddiette’.

Gathering my wits about me again, I slowly opened up the card and showed the class the picture of the black uniformed, bad-boy devil slamming the basketball through the hoop and looking down on the sad faced, red clad Cupid player. When I turned the picture to the other side of the classroom, one of my basketball teammates, Andy Lunby yelled out, “In your face Cupid, in your face!” as he got a good look at the picture.

A good part of the class started to laugh at his words and his imaginary slam-dunking motion. I heard a couple of the girls make a ‘booing sound’ and gave a thumbs down signal of derision to Andy, who waved his hands to egg on the ladies.

A pretty petite redhead, Samantha Labatt cried, “Go Cupid!” over the chorus of boos. I turned towards her and smiled. Samantha, Sammy was the granddaughter of John Labatt, the biggest brewery company in Canada, which was headquartered in downtown London. She was a new transfer student who started classes at Medway just after the Christmas holidays. I hadn’t really talked too much with her but I knew she began dating Matt Connell sometime last fall after we played London-Lucas in a preseason high school football game.

When I finally turned the card around so Mrs. B could see it, she had a big smile on her face too. Then she made a ‘hurry up’ motion with her hand and arm, and said, “Are you going to read the humorous poem today? That is what got you in this predicament in the first place isn’t it?”

“Yes ma’am on both accounts,” I replied, which earned me a quizzical look from my teacher. I probably better be careful using the ‘southernisms’ I picked up in my previous future.

I held the card up and turned sideways to the class and said, “The little caption or poem with this wonderful card goes like this, ‘Roses are Red, Violets are Blue. Cupid ... Best keep your Defenses Sharp, or the Devil will Dunk on You.‘“

“That is so cool and appropriate for you huh!” I heard Joanne Gramm call out over the oohs, awes and laughter from my classmates. She then turned around to where Lynette was sitting and said, “You did good, girlfriend,” which caused Lynette to turn nearly as red as Cupid’s uniform in this card.

“That was very cute and quite appropriate for you, Mike,” Mrs. B said as she walked back to the front of the room. “You did an excellent job entertaining us with that card, and starting Valentine’s Day off on the right foot. You can return to your seat now.”

“Thanks and I’ll be glad to,” I replied as I started back towards my desk. As I approached Lynette, she had buried her head in her hands to avoid making eye contact with me. I figured since my Valentine’s presentation was over, she suddenly felt as confused as me over her reactions.

I heard Mrs. B tell everyone to turn to page 124 in our math texts, so I quickly did as instructed and saw that we were going over how to solve quadratic equations. I quickly recalled and remembered how to work these math problems, and then let my brain wonder to what my 16 year old mind and body really wanted to know.

Several questions were bouncing off the inside of my skull as I somewhat tuned out Mrs. Bumstead’s explanation and demonstration of today’s material. The key question I really wanted to know was, ‘What in the world just happened with Lynette there?‘ As I tried to come up with a solution to that question, this new question arose, ‘Was she embarrassed about her body’s responses or her facial expressions when I put as much sugary romance as possible into that Valentine performance?‘

Before I could dig deeper into those teenage driven issues, I once again experienced the thrill of being caught daydreaming. Let me tell you, it is so much more fun being the ‘catcher’ instead of the ‘catchee’ in this type of teacher/student dynamic. Mrs. B, as observant teachers are prone to do, called on me to answer the problem on the chalkboard. Since my mind was occupied elsewhere, Lynette’s punch in my arm was required for my return to the 10^th grade math world.

Once again, I heard the class laughing at my expense. Fortunately though, I made a quick scan of the board beside Mrs. Bumstead and easily came up with, “3X – 4 and 2X + 3,” as the answer to 6X² +X – 12.

“Correct, Mr. Daydreamer. I would appreciate it however, if you would remain in the here and now in my classroom,” she said in a stern voice which really didn’t match her smiling facial expression. Again a small roar went up at her remarks. Mrs. B then hushed the noise and asked me, “Can you tell everyone how you came up with that answer please?”

“Sorry about that Mrs. Bumstead,” I began, “OK, the 6X² is broken into 3X and 2X. Then, there is a +X and a –12 in the expression. I got the 12 by multiplying 3 times 4. Doing some quick math, I determined that 4 had to be negative and 3 had to be positive to generate the +x and –12 term.”

“Nicely done, Mike. Do any of you still have troubles with those steps involved in solving these equations?” Mrs. B asked the class. A couple of hands went up and she asked those students to come up to the board to work with her on them. “The rest of can you start working on problems 4 through 25 on page 125 and 126. If you have troubles with any of them, raise your hand and I’ll get to you when I can.”

I set about doing these relatively easy math problems. They weren’t too much trouble the first time I had to do them and now they seemed like a piece of cake as I ploughed through them. I took a glance over at Lynette beside me and saw she was struggling with a one of the medium level problems. I leaned over towards her and asked, “Want me to help you with that one?”

I just about fell out of my desk as I heard her soft, but sharp reply, “Leave me alone and just do your own work.” She then angled her body away from me and semi-guarded her notebook as she sat there and faked working out the next problem.

I pulled myself back upright in my desk and softly said, “Sorry for offering my help.” I proceeded to zone in on my work and knocked out the remaining 3 problems. I closed up my text and notebook and was just about to raise my hand to ask Mrs. B if I could get a drink of water, when I felt a soft hand touch my orange and black Flyers’ sweatshirt covered arm.

I turned in its direction and saw a tear in Lynette’s eye and a sad look on her face. She softly mumbled, “I’m sorry for snappin’ at you. I don’t know why I did ... no, I do know why, and I’m just sorry.”

I weakly smiled back at her and replied, “What did you do? I don’t remember you snapping at me,” which raised a small smile in her previously sullen face. “So Ms. Lynette, do you need any help with these problems or did you get the hang of them?”

Before she could answer, the class ending bell sounded. As she closed up her text and notebook, she softly said, “Can I talk with you during our spare period today?”

I looked at her, trying to figure out once again what was going on behind her teary brown eyes. I let the two students who were seated behind me move on past and then walked up my row, alongside Lynette and said, “Sure thing Robber. And thanks again for that awesome Valentine’s card.”

Lynette’s face brightened up some as she heard me call her by my unique name for her, which basically informed her all was truly well with me, with us. “Thanks Nevs. Have a good Valentine’s Day but not too good!” she said with a bigger smile. “Will I meet you in the café or in the library at the start of the 7^th?”

“I have lunch in the 6^th, so let’s meet in the café and we’ll play it by ear from there,” I replied as I turned right out of the math classroom. I semi-shouted to her over the hallway noise as she turned left towards her 2^nd period PE class and the gym, “Don’t work too hard now, but gets lots done.”

On my way to my 2^nd period general science class, I ran into Paul McGregory. He was my best friend and next door neighbor. Paul was a little over a month older than me but he was in the 11^th grade since the cutoff date for starting school was December 31. Paul and his twin sister Cathy were able to go to school a year before me as little tykes. I was glad to see him for the first time since my return and found that he hadn’t changed one iota from my previous run-through high school. When he saw me walking towards him in the hallway, he definitely knew something wasn’t the same with me though as he said, “Wow dude, whose baby did you eat last night or this morning? You look at least 2 inches taller and 10-15 pounds bigger than yesterday!”

“Well hello to you too, sleepy head. I noticed you missed the bus again this morning.”

“Don’t try to change the subject on me man. What’s going on with you?” Paul stood beside me and I was just a tad bit taller than him now and a good bit more muscular too. He looked me square in the eyes, and I knew right then and there that I had to tell him the truth about me as we always shared almost everything with each other. I just had to figure out a way to do it and have him believe what I was saying.

Chapter 3 »